The ordinary way of dealing with people who break the law is to invoke the law against them.
Despite efforts by the Islamists to invoke the law, the tide in Egypt's culture wars may slowly be turning against them.
In 2005, the Chamber of Commerce was the first business group to invoke the law, using it to successfully challenge certain S.E.C. rules for the mutual fund industry.
Prosecutors, who used to be its most ardent supporters, are increasingly using their discretion not to invoke the law for minor offences.
The success rate of those who invoke the law is greater if the victim is black than if he is white.
Once elected, he made it a matter of policy to invoke the law carefully so as to avoid "disproportionately harsh sentences for relatively minor crimes".
Now people are quick to complain in terms of rights and injustice, and they invoke the law and band together, albeit loosely, on this basis.
"I realised we had to take the law into the classroom and create an atmosphere that allows children to invoke the law, otherwise the laws are pointless," says the deputy commissioner of police, Veenu Bansal, who devised the project.
The prosecutors' decision to invoke the law calling for a mandatory sentence in Mr. Dossie's case meant that Judge Gleeson had no choice but to send Mr. Dossie away for five years.
Ruling on a challenge brought by inmates in an Indiana prison who opposed the state's effort to invoke the law, the federal appeals court in Chicago declared the automatic-stay provision unconstitutional.
